Remote Control (18 page)

And then he thought of all the people who had been captured, released, and then co-opted into stealing ChaoSonic secrets. Now he knew how they had been kept to their word. There were nanobots in their blood. “Do as we say or you’ll fall asleep” was quite a fearsome threat, and Six figured that worse chemicals could be carried by the tiny robots. Arsenic, cyanide, peroxide—any of a dozen poisons.

Six put the remote back in the holster. This presented a problem. What if Kyntak had been injected with the nanobots? It seemed likely. A hostage with nanobots in his blood would be much easier to interrogate.

Even if Six found Kyntak and got him out without the alarm being raised, there would be nowhere to run. Kyntak would have microscopic beacons coursing through his veins, beaming his location to every monitor in the facility.

Apparently there were no surveillance cameras in the room. Kyntak couldn’t see any, and the neck clamp was loose enough to allow his head to turn and scan the whole area. He figured that Vanish had weighed the risks of putting additional equipment in this otherwise sterile room against the benefits of watching him lie on the table and decided that it was better to make the cell featureless.

All the better. Kyntak wasn’t sure what he’d do once he got off the table, but being watched would severely limit his options.

The wrist clamps were tight, but they’d been left loose enough to keep his circulation flowing. Kyntak gritted his teeth as he pulled. His theory was that if he tugged with enough force, he could dislocate the bones in his hand and make it slip through the clamp. Then he could reset the joints with his teeth and use the hand to hit the buttons that unlocked the clamps around his other joints. Then he would wait for Vanish to come in, kick the stuffing out of him, and run.

One, two, three. Pull!
He drew his breath in sharply as the flesh of his hand was squeezed between the metal and his bones. He stopped before there was a risk of the cuff cutting him—this was hard enough already without having to worry that his skin
would be scraped off his hand. Not to mention that if Vanish came back too early, he might notice that Kyntak was bleeding.

One, two, three. Pull!
He crushed the base of his palm against the rim of the clamp, and a whimper of pain escaped his lips. His freakishly strong bones and joints withstood the pressure. He stopped once again.
I’ll have some impressive bruises if I live long enough
, he thought.

“Yeeaargh!” He tried to throw his body into the air, hips first—there were no restraints around his torso. He held himself up like a crooked bridge, straining against the clamps at his knees and elbows, the restraint around his neck choking him.

Thud.
He landed back on the table, the impact sending a shock of pain into his coccyx. He breathed quickly and deeply, saturating his brain with oxygen to numb the pain, and flexed his aching wrist.

One, two
—

The wall started rolling aside. Kyntak immediately slumped limply against the table, heart pounding. He lifted his head as the door opened, as if he had just woken up.

“We must stop meeting like this,” he said as Vanish and the red-eyed woman entered. She stood silently in the corner, gun in one hand.

Vanish approached the table. “How do you feel?” he asked. “Headache gone? Any nausea?”

“My back is a little itchy in a spot I can’t quite reach,” Kyntak said.

“Cold?” Vanish asked, ignoring him. “Thirsty?”

Kyntak was thirsty, but he doubted that saying so would get him anything to drink. “Your torture methods suck,” he said. “It’s like the water torture, but with dumb questions instead of drips.”

“I don’t want you damaged,” Vanish said. He began to pace slowly from one side of the room to the other. “Not yet.”

“You want me to win a beauty competition first?” Kyntak asked. “The kidnapping makes sense now—you’d never win one on your own.”

Vanish smiled. “No, I’m just waiting for Agent Six to get here.”

Kyntak’s heart thumped faster, and he was suddenly certain Vanish could hear it. He kept his voice level. “I don’t get it,” he said.

“Yes, you do,” Vanish said. “Your twin brother? Or should I say triplet brother—Sevadonn may be dead now, but he was part of Project Falcon too.”

“Now I am thoroughly confused,” Kyntak said. “The Deck didn’t pay up, so you assume I’m not the real deal?”

“You know what the secret to a good plan is, Kyntak?” Vanish pierced him with a cheery grey gaze. “Fluidity. Let’s say I want to capture the remaining two Project Falcon kids. I stage a prison break as bait, and leave a trail to an empty apartment building by planting the blood of one of the residents I’ve disposed of. So far, so good. But then what happens?”

He laughed. The noise bounced off the walls, hitting Kyntak from all sides. “They both show up! Not just the one from the Deck, but the freelancer too! And, of course, I’ve given my troops orders to take the agent with the superhuman abilities, but I’ve never imagined two would show up and confuse them. After all, when every scientist wants you dissected and every vigilante wants you dead, you don’t expose more than you have to, right? Sending two Falcons to a job that only requires one is stupid, correct?”

Kyntak tried one last time. “You got me,” he said, slipping a little sarcasm into his tone. “I’m not Agent Six of Hearts, I’m just an impersonator. Guess you’re going to have to let me go now, huh?”

Vanish shook his head. “I’ve known who you are since you first spoke to me,” he said. “I’ve studied both of you. The real Agent Six would have pretended to be another Deck agent, a generic. A regular human being. But not you. ‘My reputation precedes me?’ you said. Because secretly, and I find this fascinating, you were
glad
when I mistook you for him. He’s becoming a big name in the criminal underworld, and you’re jealous. And the fact that Six sees it as a liability, that he wishes he could remain anonymous, that’s conducive to celebrity, and that just makes it worse.”

“Yeah,” Kyntak said. “I’ve been knocked out, abducted, clamped to a table, drained of my blood, bored to death by this empty room and by your ranting. But it’s really hard to concentrate on all that when I’m so busy wishing I was my brother.”

“But when the two of you showed up,” Vanish said, ignoring him once more, “did my plan collapse? Of course not, because it was fluid. I was originally expecting to take one and get the other when he came to the rescue, and Six’s surprise appearance didn’t stop me. I sent the ransom demand as planned and told my troops to take Six alive if they could. The fact that Six showed up to collect you instead of you showing up to collect him didn’t change a thing.”

“Yeah, it did,” Kyntak said. “You obviously didn’t catch him.”

Vanish’s grin broadened. “You’re right. He’s evaded my capture twice. He must be the competent one. He brought a friend
with him who killed a few of my troops. But did this mess up my plan? No. Because it’s fluid.”

He leaned down close to Kyntak. “Six has been headed our way for the better part of an hour. He’s in this facility right now, looking for you. I didn’t need to bring the trap to him—he came to it. And as soon as he’s on the floor…” Vanish’s white teeth showed as he smiled. “See? Both the Project Falcon kids are mine.”

Kyntak’s breaths were becoming tighter. It was as if his lungs were slowly crystallizing, or caking over with ice. “You think the Deck will give you more money if you hand over both of us? After you let down your end of the bargain last time?”

Vanish sighed, as if disappointed in Kyntak. “You thought this was about money? The ransom was a secondary objective—there are easier ways to get a hundred million credits.” He beckoned to the woman and walked towards the wall. She muttered something into her radio and the wall rolled aside.

“I don’t want the Deck’s money,” Vanish said on his way out. “I want
you.
”

Six found the remote of the soldier he’d knocked out, held it against the man’s skin, and hit the button marked
SYNCAL
. There was no outward sign of change, but Six hoped this meant he wouldn’t wake up anytime soon. He dumped the soldier on his bunk, straightening his limbs so his posture was identical to that of all the other sleeping troops. Six saw the shirt and pants on the floor where the soldier had dropped them and, after a moment of hesitation, he put them on. The soldier had placed his boots neatly under his bunk. Six slipped them on too.

The whole outfit was too big for him. The bulletproof plastic in the shirt hung below his collarbone instead of reaching his throat, the pants bunched up slightly around his ankles, and the soles of his feet lifted off the insoles in the boots every time he took a step. But it was a better disguise than nothing, and he didn’t have time to check all the bunks for a shorter soldier.

He jogged clumsily back to the armory and took a sample of the standard gear: knife, pistol, Eagle, grenades, spare magazine. Lastly he jammed a helmet onto his head.

He hesitated before leaving. His job might be made easier later by a little sabotage. He swept his arm across the row of Eagles, hitting the eject button on each one. All the magazines fell to the floor. He gathered them up and dumped them in the darkness behind the pipe with the belts hanging from it. The automatic rifles now each had only one bullet in them, the one that was loaded into the chamber. They would click empty almost as soon as the triggers were pulled.

He grabbed a hundred or so of the spare magazines, quickly emptied the bullets into an upturned helmet, and put it underneath the spares. He put the empty magazines back on the shelves, at the front.

There wasn’t much else he could do without being too obvious, and he didn’t want to waste any more time. He moved quickly back through the barracks and headed to the other end of the aisle.

There was no elevator at this end, just a giant stairwell with concrete walls and thick, strong stairs. It looked like it was designed so all the soldiers could run down at once. But there were only four flights—Six reached the bottom in a matter of seconds.

The stairwell led directly into a short corridor. He peeked around the corner, checking for soldiers—and froze.

There was another entire warehouse beyond the opening, identical in construction to the one two floors above. But this one held more than a few cars and an airplane; it was a massive labyrinth of equipment.

Six could see four huge motors and two electrical generators propped up on metal stilts, with tables covered in repair equipment underneath them. The hollowed-out shell of a bus was resting upside down, and an enormous spiderlike machine was poised over it, steel claws locked around the one remaining axle. There were dozens of airtight Plexiglas chambers, with rubber gloves built into the framework. Judging by the shrink-wrapped lumps of grey plastic next to them, these were for making bombs. In the center of the warehouse there was a giant cube of thick tinted glass, through which Six could see a web of tubes and valves, occasionally lighting up as sparks blasted back and forth along exposed wires.

Six didn’t have enough general mechanical experience to recognize the functions of everything in this room, but he had a gut feeling that the device in the enormous glass box was manufacturing nanomachines.
If there’s time
, he thought,
I should smash the glass to break the vacuum seal on my way back. The more I can do to sabotage Vanish’s operations, the better.

A huge creature of iron and steel rested in the corner of the warehouse. Six stared, unsure of what he was seeing. There was a short, hollow tube attached to the front, like a pitiless black eye on a stalk, and instead of wheels or legs, the thing had great rollers covered by strips of armor plating the color of engine grease.

An illustration from a history website flashed through his mind, and Six’s eyes widened as he realized what he was looking
at—it was a tank. It didn’t look quite finished—the hatch on the top had no seal, and the gun was only half as long as it should be. But there was no mistaking the shape. Vanish had acquired a tank, and was restoring it for some reason.

There were five soldiers in the warehouse, pacing slowly back and forth like the ones upstairs. Six adjusted his overly large costume self-consciously as he scanned the warehouse for the exit. On the opposite wall there was an elevator, just like the one in the previous warehouse. Six checked the positions of all the guards. If he timed this right, he wouldn’t have to walk too close to any of them.

He took a deep breath.
Now!

He strode into the warehouse, at a pace that felt neither urgent nor aimless. He passed one of the bomb-making chambers on his right and resisted the urge to glance at it, focusing his gaze on the elevator doors up ahead.

There was one soldier walking past the elevator, and another one patrolling in Six’s peripheral vision. Neither of them had stopped to look at him—either they were unconcerned by his presence or they hadn’t seen him yet. He kept walking, passing the giant glass cube on his left.

Four of five soldiers were now behind him. He kept his eyes on the elevator doors, but listened carefully, waiting for the sound of approaching footsteps. His breathing seemed painfully loud inside the helmet.

Almost there. He passed another of the bomb-making chambers on his left. He was almost level with the hollow bus. He forced his gaze away from the mechanical spider, as if looking at it would draw the focus of one of its many plasma lenses. He was ahead of all five soldiers, but one would reach the elevator in less than a minute. He planned to get there first.

He kept his carefully measured pace.
Left foot, right foot. Not too fast, not too slow. You’re fine
, he told himself.
You’re invisible to them. They’re not expecting any trouble, and you’re nothing out of the ordinary. Unless you do something stupid, like running. So just keep walking and you’re okay.

He reached the elevator doors and pushed the button, just once. Then he waited patiently. The next guard wouldn’t pass him for at least twenty seconds.
Relax.

His breaths boomed against his visor. He imagined that he could feel the eyes of the five soldiers watching him. That he could sense them slowly creeping towards him, rifles raised, communicating with hand signals and slowly surrounding him.

The doors slid apart. Six started to walk in, and then paused—there was a soldier in it already. Six stepped aside, leaving him room to walk out. The soldier’s helmet turned to Six in acknowledgment, but there was no nod of approval or grunt of thanks. He kept walking, disappearing behind one of the machines.

Six stopped watching and turned to the elevator again.
Behave normally
, he told himself.
Like you do this every day.
He stepped into the elevator and waited for the doors to close, ignoring the security camera. Through the opening he watched the soldiers slowly pace the perimeter of the warehouse until the doors slid shut.